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Two - HALF-MAST 6
On the one hand she didn’t want to
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The Third Twin 7
To my voiced approval, my hotel had a ‘business center’, which basically consisted of a computer and a printer perched on a desk that barely fit in the small cubicle. The internet service wasn’t the best, the load times irksomely long, but when the results for my search engine entry came up, the wait proved worth it. The very first link led to an interesting article, but when taken in context, became the unearthed Dead Sea Scrolls, a mysterious supporting document to a book built on faith or delusion.The website was a news oriented publication out of the UK. The article, dated January 24, 2009, focused on the abnormal ratio of twins to single births in a small Brazilian town. That fearsome villain of the modern era, Josef Mengele, was named in the title of the article. Strange that a name which ordinarily existed in the pages of history
The Third Twin 8
This time I took a taxi. Not because I didn’t want to walk, but because I didn’t want to be seen in advance. I’d no idea if she would be there, but if I was so lucky, I wanted to surprise her. I didn’t want her waiting on me, not again, flourishing that regal nonchalance as she spoke of her unnatural world and its black miracles. I wanted command, and the morning’s experience in Rio Tago—not least Investigator Pinto’s parting words, which had smacked of mortal psychopaths and investigable, mentally tractable serial offenses—hopefully would contribute to that. But I was to have more ammunition than this by the time I got there. They say cabbies can get you anything you want. Mine did that and then some, and I didn’t even have to ask.It started when I got in the taxi and didn’t quit until we were pulling up at the house.
The Third Twin 9
Having no desire to be caught exposed on the open road, I decided to find another route back. The most obvious option was the shoreline, assuming it was traversable. I suspected the street descended around the next hill to the vicinity of the shore, but even taking it in the opposite direction from town smacked of tempting fate, which I was sure had had enough of me today. If I needed proof of that, I’d only to look at the small gash in my arm. How I’d mustered the balls to even consider it, I don’t know, but when I’d wandered from the shop back to the gate in the rear wall, checking its lock, I’d spooked a rather large but mobile lizard perched on top of the wall, which had managed in its flight to relocate a piece of glass (like castle defender, like castle defender) that caught the edge of my forearm as it fell. Whether I would have followed through with the idea of entering the Cunhedo home was another question I’d no answer to, but I’d taken my
The Third Twin 10
It was over. The search for answers was finished. I could hold on to only one thing now—Kristin’s very soul. Her body had managed, amazingly, to heal its wounds without infection, but that was as far as any recuperation went. The mind cannot fathom such a husk as occupied that white room. That white, padded room. Though I experienced the fits that possessed her only once, and then just a taste, I saw the aftermath again and again. On every visit she looked the same, as if the devil himself had been inside her. And her eyes . . . god, her eyes. You have never seen such holes. I was deafened by her vast emptiness, rendered miniscule, microscopic. She was like I would imagine the true soul of a god to be, so heavy with the weight of mortal screams as to have collapsed upon itself, bringing everything within its event horizon inside with it. I could not look at her for longer than seconds at a time for fear of suffering exactly that fate. Kathy was far
The Third Twin THREE - GLIMMERS 11
Every frequent flyer has an extraordinary flight experience in their repertoire. They may have met a celebrity on the plane, or witnessed a person having a heart attack; discovered the man sitting next to them is a distant relative, seen a potential hijack thwarted. Mine happened on the Frankfurt-Munich leg of my Bavarian trip, and while less dramatic than the above examples, was perhaps every bit as meaningful, though I wouldn’t say so to the family of the heart attack victim. My experience came in the form of two pleasant, attractive ladies next to whom circumstances placed me on the plane. We were not assigned the three side-by-side seats in the middle section of rows, but ended up there after we did some shifting to accommodate a family separated in its seating. I wound up in the aisle seat, with the two women sitting to my right, and the rest, as they say, is history—one fragile and arcane thread of it anyway.
The Third Twin 12
12As we sat back for the first time in at least an hour, the ladies on their couch, I in my cushioned armchair, I’d left out nothing. No detail that I could readily recall, no impression, however fanciful it seemed. And not once had their suspension of disbelief seemed strained. Equipped with at least Dianna’s longstanding relationship with the paranormal, they’d apparently made the decision somewhere along the way to quit resisting what lay outside known bounds and to proceed as though the supernatural was as legitimate a player as anything that could be converted to formula. Which effectively rendered ‘suspension of disbelief’ an obsolete term unless proven otherwise, and somehow I didn’t see any of us reserving hope that the land-based and scientifically logical explanations would suddenly pop up out of the puzzle’s assembly. The sobe
The Third Twin 13
In the darkness of my hotel room, I found myself again in the alternate sentient state, my dream-sense lucid enough this time that I was conscious of the soft tick-tocking in the background, and the foreignness of it, from the very beginning. We were walking to the chapel, side by side, my third daughter and I. This time, instead of breaking off on the animal trail, we remained on the main path, which shone with purpose in the columns of sunlight filtering in through the canopy. The building was just becoming visible ahead when she touched my hand with hers.“Father?” she said.“Yes?”“What is my name?”
The Third Twin 14
The five of us sat as a group for the first time at an outdoor table at Berchtesgaden’s Café Strasbourg. The views from the terrace were grand, Herr Ritter having obviously selected the location that would speak most eloquently for the element in which his party would be spending the next two weeks. The restaurant was situated on the side of a hill, and from where I sat, Dianna to my left, Ritter to my right, I had a dead-on look at Germany’s third highest mountain, Mount Watzmann. Against the backdrop of an isolated cloud cluster in an otherwise clear sky, its twin snow-capped peaks looked like the hooks of a nasty vise that was as likely to shear its victim in two as to clamp it in place. Conspicuously out of the view was Mount Kehlstein, on a spur of which rested Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, a visit not for another day as I’d have thought, but one which, unbeknownst to us, had been written into our itinerary. When I heard this, I’d been instantly suspi
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